Bula! Fiji island life

Chris kayaks

It may sound ungrateful, given how much of a once-in-a-lifetime dream destination it is for a lot of people (including Jim Carey in The Truman Show!), but in our heads Fiji was always just the gap between “the travelling” and “the part where we got jobs”. It was a three-week buffer between finishing up our Latin America trip and landing in New Zealand and we didn’t really think about or plan it until the days immediately before we were due to fly – when we rapidly had to think about it quite a lot. Of course, Fiji ended up being far more than a few-week stopgap!

The river was high in Sigatoka

A cyclone hit Fiji the week before our arrival, bringing with it floods and taking out a key bridge between the airport in Nadi and the rest of the island. Air Pacific cancelled all their flights, eventually including ours, and we had to reschedule for four days later (after two hours on hold). This significantly shortened our time on the islands, but honestly we didn’t mind – we were having a blinder in California and felt lucky we were able to extend our stay there.

All we’d planned was two nights at the lovely-staffed Bamboo Hostel in Nadi. After a few days of jetlag recovery and joint relocation (I dislocated a toe walking into Chris. Will this teach me to watch where I’m going? Probably not.) we tagged along with two  friends we made there, Kai and Robin, as they drove from Nadi over to the capital, Suva, on the other side of the main island.

The end of the day on the coral coast, Fiji

More than 300 islands make up Fiji but we decided to save cash by staying on the main island Viti Levu, in the west and on the coral coast in the south. The two halves of this island have totally different climates and landscapes, it’s something to do with trade winds. The south/west half where we were is very hot, very wet at this time of year and incredibly humid. The landscape looks like big piles of boulders and pointy rocks draped in fake grass and an explosion of plants. Many trees are totally dripping in a bright green invasive climber of some sort, the overall effect being that of someone chucking a heavily camouflaged Army crawl net over a small forest.

Kai and Robin dropped us off about halfway between Nadi and Suva at a budget beach resort people kept raving about called the Beachouse. On the drive over we passed washed-out bridges and seriously eroded muddy riverbanks and the largest Hindu temple in the South Pacific – around half the population of Fiji is of Indian descent, something which dates back to when we Brits waltzed in and colonised the place – and had to pull the bags in off the roof very quickly as a thunderstorm started.

Sea kayak bliss

The Beachouse itself was, well, brilliantly located. It was right on the edge of a lagoon that went straight into the ocean and that was warm and shallow when the tide was in. In the afternoon, between storms and just as the tide was going out, it was the most beautiful: the sky would be big purple and smoke-coloured clouds with bright white-blue spaces in between, all reflected in the silvery flat lagoon broken up by curving bands of bronze sand, and separated from the sky by a distant stripe of surf and turquoise-grey Pacific. There were geckos everywhere, tiny hermit crabs by the pool, scones and tea at 3.30pm and free sea kayak rental (see our earlier video blog). The night sky, also, was unbelievable - with very little light pollution the Milky Way put in a star (geddit?) performance.

We spent a lot of our time working on our job searches but also a lot of time playing with Chris's new waterproof camera, splashing about, playing games and generally fully making the most of the last weeks away before we get stuck in to life in New Zealand. We arrive at 1pm Saturday and are very, very excited about what is to come. But, for now, we're all about enjoying our last few days in paradise.

SARAH